Tag Archives: XBehave extract gherkin

For a project in my day job we have been using the excellent XBehave for our integration tests. I love XBehave in that it lets you use a Given, When, Then syntax over the top of XUnit. There are a couple of issues with XBehave that I have yet to find a neat solution for (unless I am missing something please tell me if this is the case). The issues are

1) There is not a nice way to extract the Given, When, Then gherkin syntax out of the C# assembly for reporting
2) The runner treats each step in the scenario as a separate test

To solve these to problems I am writing an open source parser that takes the xml produced by the XUnit console runner and parses it to a C# model. I can then use razor to render these models as html and spit out the resultant html.

This will mean that I can take the html and post it up to a wiki so every time a new build runs the tests it would be able to update the wiki with the latest set of tests that are in the code and even say whether the tests pass or fail. Allowing a business/product owner to review the tests, see which pieces of functionality are covered and which features have been completed.

A neat class that I am using inside the XUnit.Reporter is the AssemblyResource class. This class allows easy access to embedded assembly resources. Which means that I can run the XUnit console runner for a test, take the resultant output and add it to the test assembly as an embedded resource. I can then use the AssemblyResource class to load back the text from the xml file by using the following line of code:

To produce the test xml files for the tests I simply set up a console app, added XBehave and then created a test in the state I wanted for example a single scenario that passes. I then ran the XUnit console runner with the -xml flag set to produce the xml output. I then copied the xml output to a test file and named it accordingly.

The statistics for the assembly model and test collection model are not aligned to what I think you would want from an XBehave test. For example if you have this single XBehave test:

If you look carefully at the xml you will notice a number of things which are counter-intuative. Firstly look at the total in the assembly element it says 4, when we only had a single test. This is because the runner is considering each step to be a separate test. The same goes for the other totals and the totals in the collection element. The next thing that you will notice is that the step names in the original test have had a load of junk added to the front of them.

In the parser I produce a model with the results that I would expect. So for the above xml it I produce an assembly model with a total of 1 test, 1 passed, 0 failed, 0 skipped and 0 errors. Which I think makes much more sense for XBehave tests.

Feel free to clone the repository and look through the parsing code (warning it is a big ugly). Next time I will be talking through the remainder of this app which is rendering the test results to html using razor.